How a CDN Can Add Scalability to Your Applications

With any startup application, cost is always an issue. Developers don’t want to cut corners, but when a budget is set it’s difficult to determine the most important factors to include with the initial launch. IT infrastructure is generally expensive, so any upfront costs take a huge cut of your budget. Not every factor in IT has to break your budget. With a CDN, you can scale costs as your application popularity grows.

Easy Integration

One factor to infrastructure and development being so expensive for an initial launch is integration. You need the right equipment and the right application programming to seamlessly combine them all into a user-friendly environment. A CDN makes integration easy for everyone involved in the development process. It’s a lightweight solution that brings performance and security to an application. A CDN takes away much of the technical overhead so that developers can focus on application code.

Security

Application security is one of the most difficult things to implement for new developers. Developers don’t have the knowledge of a security expert, so they need help with protecting their assets including customer data. A CDN can protect from several attacks including DDoS activity. Traffic and application files are distributed among several different data centers. Should an attacker launch a DDoS attack against one specific data center, traffic can be rerouted to others. Another benefit is using the CDN’s DDoS detection systems. DDoS attacks are notoriously spontaneous and no warning is given before they happen. A CDN has the right infrastructure in place to alert administrators and application developers that an attack is currently in progress.

Reliability

When you host an application in one location, should that one location crash the entire application fails. This interrupts service for your users, and it can frustrate users so much that they quit using it. Reliability is a necessary component for any application. There’s no excuse for any application to fail when it’s using a CDN. A CDN can keep an application active even should your origin server crash. While you figure out technical issues on your origin hosting servers, a CDN keeps content cached on their own edge servers allowing users to still get content 24/7.

Better Performance

Traditional hosting servers aren’t able to keep up with the demands of a global market. There are many more users connected online, and a global application might have to support thousands of concurrent users. When thousands of users connect to the same origin server, performance suffers. This is especially common for gaming developers during initial launch of a new game or after an expansion release. By distributing content across several servers, developers are able to lessen the load on servers and offer a closer data center relative to the user’s location.

Cost

Because you pay as you go, costs for a CDN also scale with application popularity. You pay a low monthly cost as development happens, and you only pay increased fees as you gain more users. A CDN brings more than just IT benefits, but with pay as you go plans you have a way to keep costs low while building a user base from marketing and press.

Get the latest in Web Performance

Subscribe now to receive the latest news, tips and tricks in web performance!

The information you provide will be used in accordance with the terms of our privacy policy